If Democrats want votes, they should rain fury on union-busting corporations | Hamilton Nolan

We supposedly have the most pro-union US president of our lifetimes. Let's see him act like it

In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company's history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store. In shutting down a location that was set to unionize, Chipotle was keeping company with Starbucks, which has suddenly undertaken a campaign to shut down several unionizing locations from coast to coast due to safety" issues, and the health food company Amy's Kitchen, which last month closed an entire factory in California where workers were organizing. It is, of course, impossible to prove" that these companies closed these locations to try to crush the union drives, in the same sense that it is impossible to prove that a schoolyard bully meant to punch you in the face: he claims that he was merely punching the air while you happened to walk in front of his fist. Who's to say what's true in such a murky situation?

Plausible deniability aside, this is an extremely serious problem. Not just for the underpaid, overworked employees at all of these low-wage jobs, desperately hanging on to financial survival by their fingernails, but for all of us. America is mired in a half-century-long crisis of rising inequality that has been fueled, above all, by the combined erosion of labor power and the growth of the power of capital. The American dream enjoyed by the lucky baby-boom generation - buying a home and sending your kids to college on one income - is dead and gone, replaced by a thin crust of the rich sitting atop a huge swamp of once-middle-class jobs that no longer offer enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.